I Didn't Leave the Left. It Left Me.

by Joshua Hoffman, FutureOfJewish.com, Oct. 17, 2026

People in my family sometimes ask how someone (me) who grew up in a Left-wing household ended up becoming Right-wing.

My answer is simple: My views haven’t changed nearly as much as they think. They’ve certainly evolved over the years, but the more fundamental transformation wasn’t mine. It was the Left’s.

I didn’t move nearly as far to the Right as the Left moved away from the principles it once stood for. In fact, the Left has become the very thing it spent decades condemning: the Right.

There was a time when the political Left defined itself by everything it believed was wrong with the Right.

The Right was accused of reducing people to their race, religion, and ethnicity. The Right was accused of putting ideology before evidence, demanding conformity over independent thought, and dividing society into competing tribes. The Right was accused of exploiting fear, perpetuating prejudice, and manipulating ordinary people into voting against their own interests. And, of course, the Right was associated with one of humanity’s oldest and most destructive hatreds: antisemitism.

Something remarkable has happened. The Left has become almost everything it once accused the Right of being.

Take, for example, identity politics.

For generations, leftists rightly condemned the idea that a person’s race or religion should determine their worth, opportunities, or moral standing. They challenged a worldview that placed white Christians at the center of society and treated everyone else as outsiders. The underlying principle was a powerful one: Human beings should be judged as individuals, not as representatives of racial, ethnic, or religious categories.

Yet many of today’s Left-wing movements increasingly operate according to precisely the opposite principle. They have constructed their own hierarchy of identities, assigning people moral authority or collective guilt according to where they fall on a spectrum.

In this new worldview, being a so-called “person of color” is presumed to confer a particular moral perspective, while being “white” is presumed to confer privilege, whether or not the individual’s actual circumstances support either assumption. Disagreement is no longer necessarily evidence of a different interpretation of the facts; it can be dismissed as evidence of someone’s race, identity, or supposed position within an oppressive system.

What matters is not what someone says, but who is saying it. This is the same intellectual error that leftists once fought so vigorously to defeat. The Left has not liberated society from identity politics. It has merely reversed the identities that are celebrated and condemned.

And nowhere is the absurdity of this worldview more apparent than in its treatment of Jews. Here is a people who endured 2,000 years of persecution, expulsions, massacres, forced conversions, institutional discrimination, and ultimately the Holocaust. A people who remained stateless and vulnerable for centuries before reestablishing their sovereign homeland.

Yet according to the contemporary Left’s imagination, Jews, particularly Israeli Jews, have somehow become the ultimate representatives of “privilege” and “oppression.” The descendants of Holocaust survivors are now routinely portrayed as colonialists. A nation established in the ancestral homeland of the Jewish People, partly to ensure that Jews would never again depend on the goodwill of others for their survival, is treated as an illegitimate expression of power.

Jewish history has become an inconvenience to the ideological categories into which much of the Left insists on forcing the world.

The transformation is equally apparent in the Left’s relationship with the very minorities it claims to champion. Progressivism once promised to improve people’s lives by expanding opportunity, education, economic mobility, and individual freedom.

Increasingly, however, its political language emphasizes the permanence of victimhood.

Rather than measuring success by how many people escape poverty, achieve financial independence, build stable families, or gain the freedom to determine their own futures, its loudest voices measure political righteousness by how convincingly they can identify systems of “oppression.” Every disparity becomes evidence of discrimination. Every setback becomes a structural injustice. Every individual success risks being dismissed as an exception that proves the rule.

This is a particularly insidious form of politics because it creates a perverse incentive: A movement that derives its moral authority from representing victims has little reason to celebrate a world in which fewer people see themselves as victims. The politician, activist, or institution becomes the indispensable protector of communities portrayed as perpetually powerless.

Instead of demanding better schools, safer neighborhoods, more affordable housing, and genuine economic advancement, the conversation too often revolves around language, representation, symbolic gestures, and ever more elaborate explanations of oppression. The people supposedly being helped are encouraged to understand themselves primarily through what has been done to them rather than through what they are capable of achieving.

The Right was once accused of keeping minorities in their place. Today’s Left risks doing something similarly debilitating by teaching minorities that their place in society is permanently defined by victimhood.

Then there is the question of intellectual honesty. The Left once prided itself on being the home of reason, science, and serious intellectual inquiry. At its best, it challenged inherited assumptions and encouraged people to question the status quo.

Today, much of the Left’s activist culture treats questioning its own assumptions as a moral offense. Complex historical conflicts are reduced to slogans. Political disagreements are turned into tests of personal virtue. People are judged less by the strength of their arguments than by their willingness to repeat the approved conclusions. Movements that once challenged orthodoxy have created an orthodoxy of its own.

Evidence that complicates the Left’s orthodoxy becomes suspect. Historical context that contradicts it becomes irrelevant. And anyone who challenges the framework risks being accused not merely of intellectual error, but of moral wrongdoing. The Left used to warn about the dangers of indoctrination. Now some of its most influential institutions seem unable to distinguish education from ideological instruction, and facts from conspiracy theories.

Consider how the accusation that Israel is “committing genocide” in Gaza has become an article of faith across much of the Left. What should be a serious legal allegation requiring rigorous examination has instead become an ideological loyalty test.

The massacre of October 7th, Hamas’ genocidal ideology, its cynical use of human shields and civilian areas for military operations, and the distinction between civilian casualties and the deliberate extermination of a people are treated as irrelevant distractions.

The possibility that Israel is fighting a war against a terrorist organization rather than waging a campaign to eradicate Palestinians is scarcely entertained. The conclusion comes first; the evidence is made to follow. And anyone who questions that conclusion is branded a genocide denier, a propagandist, or an accomplice to mass murder.

What makes this particularly disturbing is how the accusation has, in some circles, evolved into something resembling a conspiracy theory: a sweeping narrative in which every Israeli action is evidence of genocidal intent, every contradictory fact is dismissed as propaganda, and every attempt to introduce historical or military context is treated as a deliberate effort to conceal the truth.

To question the genocide allegation is not to deny Palestinian suffering, just as questioning an accusation of murder is not to deny that someone has died. It is to insist that the most serious accusations demand the most serious evidence.

Yet the Left increasingly treats skepticism not as an essential component of intellectual inquiry, but as a form of moral corruption. A movement that once taught people to question everything now demands that they question nothing it has already decided to believe.

The same inversion has overtaken freedom of expression. The Left once fought against censorship, defended dissenters, and challenged institutions that attempted to suppress unpopular opinions. Today, too many leftists seem to believe that freedom of expression is valuable primarily when it protects opinions they already approve of.

Speech that conflicts with “progressive” orthodoxies is characterized as harmful, dangerous, or inherently illegitimate. Social punishment substitutes for argument, and ideological conformity becomes a prerequisite for participation in supposedly inclusive spaces. The goal is no longer to defeat objectionable ideas through debate, but to make expressing those ideas socially unacceptable.

And maybe the most extraordinary contradiction concerns the Left’s relationship with authoritarianism and religious extremism. This is a political movement that presents itself as the guardian of women’s rights, LGBTQ rights, secularism, and personal freedom.

Yet some of its most vocal activists have become remarkably comfortable romanticizing movements and regimes that reject those principles outright, provided those movements and regimes can be placed on the supposedly “righteous” side of an anti-Western struggle. It is difficult to imagine a more intellectually bankrupt position than condemning Western democracies as “oppressive” while making excuses for extremists who deny women basic liberties, persecute sexual minorities, suppress dissent, and openly glorify political violence.

The explanation is that ideological allegiance has replaced moral consistency. If the world is divided into “oppressors” and “oppressed,” then the actions of the supposedly “oppressed” can always be rationalized as resistance, as is the case with Hamas.

Violence becomes understandable. Terrorism becomes contextual. Cruelty becomes the unfortunate consequence of historical injustice. This framework doesn’t merely excuse atrocities; it strips the people committing them of moral responsibility. It assumes that certain groups are incapable of being held to the same standards as everyone else, a profoundly condescending attitude masquerading as compassion.

And then came October 7th — the massacre that should have shattered whatever remained of the Left’s moral pretensions.

Palestinian terrorists invaded Israel, murdered families, slaughtered young people at a music festival, committed acts of sexual violence, and dragged hostages into Gaza. Yet even before Israel had launched its military response, parts of the leftist world were already explaining, contextualizing, or celebrating what had happened.

On October 7th itself, the Democratic Socialists of America issued a statement that described the attacks as “not unprovoked.” In the days and weeks that followed, university campuses and city streets became stages for demonstrations in which the language of “liberation” was used to justify or excuse the deliberate slaughter of Jews.

The significance of this reaction cannot be overstated.

Here was a movement that claimed to have made sensitivity to prejudice its defining moral mission, suddenly struggling to recognize the humanity of Jewish victims; a movement that taught the world to listen to marginalized communities began lecturing Jews about which expressions of Jewish identity were acceptable; a movement that insisted minorities should define their own experiences told Jews that their understanding of antisemitism was wrong; and a movement that claimed to defend indigenous peoples increasingly denied the historical relationship between the Jewish People and the Land of Israel.

It has become clear that Jews are welcome in “progressive” spaces, but often only under certain conditions. We can celebrate Jewish food, holidays, media, and culture, provided we do not insist too forcefully on Jewish sovereignty. We can speak about antisemitism, provided we do not connect it to “anti-Zionism.” We can remember the Holocaust, provided we do not draw the obvious conclusion that Jewish vulnerability is precisely why Jewish self-determination matters.

In some circles, Jews have even been expected to prove their political virtue by publicly repudiating the Jewish state. The Left had reinvented an ancient demand in modern language: Jews can belong, but only if we agree to become the kind of Jews that others found acceptable.

This is why the Left’s embrace of antisemitism is not some unfortunate inconsistency at the margins of an otherwise coherent ideology. It exposes the fundamental problem with the ideology itself. Once people are divided into categories of moral innocence and collective guilt, there will always be a group whose suffering is deemed less important, whose history is inconvenient, and whose rights can be subordinated to a supposedly greater cause.

For an increasingly influential part of leftist movements, that group is the Jews. The vocabulary has changed from the old prejudices of blood, religion, and race to the fashionable language of colonialism, privilege, and power, but the underlying instinct to single out Jews for exceptional suspicion remains disturbingly familiar.

There is another irony that deserves attention. The Left repeatedly accuses Israel of being an ethnostate, a colonial project, and an expression of ethnic nationalism that has no place in the modern world. Yet the same activists frequently champion national liberation movements elsewhere, treating self-determination as an almost sacred right. Palestinian national aspirations are celebrated as expressions of justice, while Jewish national aspirations are condemned as expressions of supremacy.

The distinction is not rooted in a coherent universal principle. It is rooted in the ideological role assigned to each people. Palestinians are categorized as “oppressed,” Jews as “oppressors,” and the political conclusions are decided before the historical facts have even been considered.

Israel’s existence is particularly threatening to this worldview because it represents something that much of the contemporary Left increasingly struggles to comprehend: a historically persecuted people who refused to remain victims.

Zionism is not merely a response to antisemitism. It is the Jewish People’s insistence that our history would no longer be defined exclusively by what others did to us. Instead of waiting to be rescued, Jews built institutions, revived a language, established cities, created a military, developed an economy, and restored sovereignty in our ancestral homeland.

The Zionist story is one of agency, responsibility, national renewal, and the rejection of permanent powerlessness. It is a story that should inspire anyone genuinely committed to human dignity and self-determination. Instead, it infuriates those whose ideology requires Jews to remain victims in order to qualify for sympathy.

And that, ultimately, may be the most revealing difference between the old Left and the new one.

The old Left, at its best, wanted to build a world in which people’s identities would not determine their destinies. The new Left increasingly demands that identity determine everything: who deserves sympathy, who is permitted to speak, whose grievances matter, whose history counts, and whose violence can be justified.

It has traded universal principles for competing tribal loyalties. It has replaced intellectual curiosity with ideological certainty. It has transformed compassion into a political hierarchy and convinced itself that prejudice becomes justice when directed at the correct targets.

The obsession with identity, the demand for conformity, the moralization of tribal allegiance, the hostility to dissent, and the scapegoating of Jews have returned wearing the language of “social justice.” What once would have been condemned as reactionary thinking is now frequently celebrated as revolutionary consciousness.

For Jews, this transformation should be more than a political observation. It should be a warning against outsourcing our security, our identity, or our understanding of our history to any movement that claims a monopoly on morality.

The great political irony of our age is that the Left has spent decades teaching people to recognize the dangers of the Right, only to become increasingly incapable of recognizing those same dangers in itself. It can identify bigotry when it comes wrapped in a flag or a religious slogan, but not when it comes wrapped in the language of “liberation.” It can recognize tribalism in its opponents, but not in its own moral hierarchies. It can condemn collective guilt in principle while enthusiastically assigning it to entire populations in practice.

And it can recognize antisemitism everywhere except in the mirror.